The present invention relates to the processing of wine grapes, and more specifically to an apparatus, process and related equipment for separating wine grape berries prior to conversion into must and juice for wine making
The manufacture of the highest quality wines requires the use of nearly perfect wines grapes, which are of perfect ripeness and free from foreign and extraneous matter that would lead to off flavors and/or hinder or degrade the fermentation process.
Wine grapes, being a natural agriculture product that is harvested in large commercial quantities for commercial wine making, inevitably contains some quantity of foreign or otherwise undesirable matter, be it from field contamination, so-called MOG (an acronym for “material other than grapes”) or natural variation in fruit ripeness and quality as caused by weather, pestilence, genetic variation and the like. MOG may include stems or portions thereof (such as sheared stem material produced by the action of the destemming machine), leaf material, bugs, pebbles and the like.
Current industrial practice at premium commercial wineries is to employ crews that visual inspect grapes, either before or after de-stemming, in order to manually cull and remove the undesirable matter. However, hand sorting is limited in efficiency, completeness and in particular, is not practical to remove some undesirable components. Indeed it is difficult to remove by hand sorting “shot berries” (immature grapes) as well as overripe grapes or raisins, both of which although technically grape matter, adversely effect wine taste, flavor and aroma.
Accordingly, there is a need for automated equipment and processes to remove undesirable matter from wine grape berries after de-stemming.
It is therefore a first object of the present invention to provide such equipment and a process that has the general attributes of removing MOG from de-stemmed grape berries.
It is another objective of the invention to provide such equipment and a process that removes “shot berries” as well as raisins without damaging or crushing whole ripe grapes.
It is a further objective of the invention to provide the above automated process that is highly efficient at removing undesirable components, yet does so at a high throughput of grape berries.
Still yet another object of the invention is to provide such a process and equipment which is relatively easy to maintain, with minimum and infrequent downtime for cleaning or refreshing by removing the separated undesirable materials.